Valley cities, residents benefit from recycling

Will Herzog, an executive with the ReCommunity recycling company, says one of the best ways to help the process is not to put plastic bags in the recycling barrel.

In fact, he says, any kind of sheet plastic, such as dry-cleaning bags and plastic drop cloths, could gum up the works.

Garden hoses and Christmas lights have the same negative effect.

“We accept what we call small scrap metal as part of the program,” he says. But the person who tried to recycle a water heater probably was stretching the definition of “small” too much.

He often gets queries about things like straws, plastic dining utensils and plastic bottle caps.

While those are recyclable, they’re hard to sort and it takes a lot of straws and bottle caps to make a pile of plastic worth bothering with. So no one will scream if you don’t bother with them yourself.

Herzog also says junk-mail envelopes with clear windows are OK for the recycling barrel.

One more thing: Although someone could snoop through your barrel for personal information while it’s sitting on the curb, that’s not going to happen at the recycling facility.

Stuff is flying by too quickly for anyone to have time for that. “If someone is taking the time to look for sensitive information, they won’t stay with us very long because that means they’re not doing their job,” Herzog says.

The barefoot, sundress-clad little girl probably had no clue that she was playing a bit part in a story that spans the globe, an intricate tale involving international commodities markets, vast shipping networks and the health of the planet itself.

All she cared about on a recent morning in west Mesa was wrestling her family’s recycling barrel to the curb in time for David Peña’s weekly cruise past her house.

Peña, having nearly finished dumping the contents of about 600 barrels into the craw of his 18-ton truck, allowed an Arizona Business Gazette reporter to jump on board for the final part of his run.

After polishing off the last few barrels, he headed north to the vast landfill operated by the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, where his load would join a stream of material headed for the afterlife of American consumerism.

It is a stream that yields a multimillion-dollar payoff for the cities that generate it — in the case of this particular facility, Scottsdale, Gilbert and Mesa — and gives residents the sense that they’re pitching in for a worthy cause.

The stream begins with you, the customer.

You toss a newspaper or piece of cardboard into the barrel, you roll it to the curb, and then Peña comes along.

The six-year Mesa employee drives from the right side of his rough-riding truck, winding along narrow streets and stopping at every barrel.

With the dexterity of an expert video gamer, his left hand whips a joystick left, right, up, down, guiding a giant claw that grabs the barrel, empties it and sets it down, all within seconds.

The process is loud and bone-jarring. The truck shakes violently and as for comfort, you might as well be in a major earthquake.

“It takes its toll at the end of the week,” Peña says.

Peña and his colleagues are the recycling world’s first line of defense against junk that doesn’t belong in the system. If he sees something that’s not fit to pick up, he’ll get out of the truck, remove the item and leave a note for the homeowner.

If the whole barrel is “contaminated,” to use his term, he’ll skip it and tell his supervisor, who contacts the homeowner.

With his truck full, Peña rolls up Gilbert Road and crosses the Beeline Highway, pulling onto a scale behind a building owned by ReCommunity Holdings LP.

After weigh-in, Peña backs onto what’s called the tipping floor inside the building, which already is piled high with detritus from hundreds of homes.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t stink.

Peña drops his load and heads back south to gather another. An end-loader scoops up the material and piles it onto a conveyor belt, which carries it into the guts of the building.

There, a system of belts, optical sorting equipment and humans wearing helmets and dust masks — all working with incredible speed — sorts the items, first into broad categories, such as plastics and glass, and then into various grades.

The work is hot, noisy and frenzied. Two shifts a day, 30 people per shift, most of them standing by the conveyor belts, picking out their assigned items, pitching them into the proper bins.

“It’s a very hard job,” says Will Herzog, regional business development manager for ReCommunity. “These guys do a terrific job, all day. Eight hours is a long job doing what they do.”

As the material enters the building, it is screened for stuff that could cause trouble.

“The first thing they’re pulling off there is going to be large trash, plastics, metal, anything that can foul the rest of the system,” Herzog explained.

From there, the material passes through sorting screens, scanners, magnets and more human hands. Whole bottles are separated into clear, green, brown. Broken glass gets shunted to another line. Plastics are sorted into four or five grades, metals into two.

By the end of the process, the sorted material, still on conveyers, heads to balers where it is compacted and packaged for shipping.

ReCommunity’s business model is straightforward: Pay cities a certain amount per ton for the junk, sort it and then sell it to manufacturers for a profit.

The benefit to cities is twofold: They get cash for trash, and they don’t have to pay the landfill to bury it. That’s called “diversion savings,” which adds up to millions over time.

Changing conditions in the world commodity markets already have led to two or three retrofits for the 12-year-old building, Herzog says. “As the material stream changes and as the technology in our industry changes, we have to keep up. ... We can’t just sit back and just do the same thing because it doesn’t work.”

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